1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to assigning a task (i.e., customer issue) to a consultant. More particularly, the present invention relates to assigning the task to a consultant based on estimated emotional and physical impact on the consultant.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Online support applications such as those provided by customer help services have become increasingly important. On encountering an issue, a customer can contact such a service, describe his/her issue, and then receive solutions or suggested remedies. One form of such a service is a FAQ's (Frequently Asked Question) site, where answers to commonly asked questions are posted; here the customer is not connected to a human consultant, the customer must find his/her answer by himself/herself. Standard human staffed help desks or call centers receive customer requests, e.g., via phone calls or chat room sessions. Given such a request, the next available consultant step up and handles the customer's question. Choosing a consultant is based not only on availability, e.g., whether a consultant has an assigned task or not, but also on skill set or level, e.g., only a consultant with knowledge of the LINUX operating system is assigned to issues related to LINUX. However, this choosing of a consultant does not take into account the emotional or physical state of the consultants, e.g., a given available consultant with the necessary skills will still be assigned to a given task even if he is exhausted or emotional drained from a previous customer call. It should be noted that the term consultant here does not imply any particularly high level of service technician. A consultant can include the whole spectrum of employees from advanced agents, able to perform complex analysis, to employees who simply identify an issue and route the request to the appropriate person. A commonly-assigned US patent application (application Ser. No. 11/676,825) “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR OPTIMIZING UTILIZATION OF A DONOR” (hereinafter HiGrid) provides a method of taking a given consultant's emotional (affective) and physical (somatic) states into account in making assignment decisions. However, HiGrid does not provide any method of making assignment decisions based on an estimated impact on a consultant in case of servicing a given task. Thus, there remains a need for a system and method, which includes an evaluation of the given task and uses an estimated impact on a consultant that serving the given task will have on the consultant, when determining whether or not to assign a given task to that consultant.